[Aaron]

Most often this forum features posts related to the "freak out" experience people have after they realize just how credible the peak oil theory is.

So I thought I'd share the other end of the spectrum... after the gold rush, so to speak (Props to Mr. Young)

It's a common experience for veteran members around here... once the initial shock wears off a bit, & it becomes pretty obvious that this "long emergency" is an inevitable consequence of the world's hydrocarbon habits, a certain level of acceptance sets in.

At some level you still anguish over the obvious tragedy the Chinese Finger-Trap of Peak Oil represents, but like anything, familiarity breeds contempt.

At the core of this malaise is the suspended disbelief that something so obvious & potentially deadly, could be almost invisible on the world's stage of ideas & discourse. It's confounding to logic that this simple idea remains a mystery to the vast majority of the world.

It's a contradiction the mind retreats from, like a ghost limb on an amputee.

You know it's gone... you're looking right at it... but you can still feel it.

That's how it is for me with Peak Oil. I know to my own satisfaction that peak oil theory is a valid concern, & I know that most folks will probably never understand the origin of the perils they face...

...I have suspended my disbelief of this obvious truth & recognize reality...

...but I still feel the shadow of that disbelief lurking in my skull like some phantom presence.

My hope is that I never lose this memory of a memory which is my own disbelief. Without it I stand naked before the fall.

[gego]

Nicely expressed!

We are living inside the industrial age, with most of us completely dependent on its life giving bounty. It continues from day to day, giving only scant clues of the future; everything appears normal and eternal. If someone has heard of peak oil or EROEI they think of them as some distant problem that will be solved by technology, government, the free market, or some other savior; there is no immediacy to the problem, no perceivable threat to life.

When dramatic reality reveals itself, shock results. Shock is disabling. Fear is a way of anticipating shock and giving one the ability to act instead of freeze when the shocking event arrives. Fear is now so it begs to be dealt with now.

Denial is one way to deal with fear. Look at many of the posters on this site who honestly believe that alternatives energy sources, conservation and technology are going to solve the problem. The worst they see is the inconvenience of change in lifestyle for the 6.5 billion population to continue, hoping that just living with less will make it possible to keep living.

Understanding helps to quell fear because it removes us from emotion and delivers us to logic, and even more importantly, it allows for planning. We all have our way of planning. Some will plan on giving up; some will look at the requirements of life and develop ways to provide those, absent the support of the industrial age. In either event, the future has been accepted and life can be lived for now.

[Zardoz]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Aaron', '.')..My hope is that I never lose this memory of a memory which is my own disbelief. Without it I stand naked before the fall.

[JPL]

Yep good points.

Me, I recently made myself a list (a sort-of forced exercise to get out of doomer-thinking) of all the things that would be BETTER after Oil (pleuggh...)

Well, number one was a possible solution to Climate Change. Hey, for me this was a biggie. I've been worrying/campaining about this one for 20 years and suddenly it's solved. Well that's good!

#2 - Pension plans, saving for the future, all that boring stuff. Well, that's a good one - could never see myself playing golf into my 70's anyhow, what a boring game ;o)

#3 - The chance to tell my parents (in fact anyone older than me) that seeing as they never cared about #1 - and I never cared about #2, I guess that makes us about even???

# 4 - The opportunity to live in a house with a lawn to the waist, a thriving vegetable patch, an old car (or maybe no car at all) and kids with holes in their trouser-knees and NO-ONE is going to call me a Stinking Hippie (grin).

# 5 - A chance to take stock of things, an opportunity to THINK. A time in which we can take all that crap - the plastic-fantastic, the fast-food, the TV soaps and all the neon-lit junk of modern life and
say - "Hey - was that 'really' supposed to be ME?" Was that young child that used to poke his Grandad in the belly and pick Strawberries in the back-yard, destined for nothing better than 5 hours of telly each night and a shit job?

Of-course, everyone would have their own list. But for me this one really worked.

Ultimately we all may get caught in the 'die-off' - but I for one have recently figured that mental death, from whatever quarter it comes, is worse than the other sort.

Whatever the future is, I say, 'Bring it On'.

As for Denial - well, I too have been through the 'trying to tell friends & relatives' sketch (pluurgh..) All I've figured out is, everyone else around me is MUCH better at Denial than I am. So why try and compete?

JPL

[Ludi]

In no way do I see PO as a "solution" to global climate change. Or maybe you're saying you see it as a solution to the problem of worrying about a solution to global climate change?

[mmasters]

I got a double whammy, peak oil then the central banking/globalist scam. Stuff really changes your life.

[JPL]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'I')n no way do I see PO as a "solution" to global climate change. Or maybe you're saying you see it as a solution to the problem of worrying about a solution to global climate change?

[jupiters_release]

Whats strange to me is that most of us would have never known the magnitude of peakoil without the internet. Its just really crazy to have our mythologies transformed so drastically by cyberspace, like a genetic cultural mutation with consequences beyond our morbid depression. And paradoxically can we ever face our peakoil fate without forgetting it in the present, or else live dishonestly within our current civilization-based communities for those of us who are privileged to have one. Complexity disconnected our curse and blessing extremes too far for a healthy life imo.

[medicvet]

Well, once I got over the shock and began accepting that lifestyles would change, I decided that maybe I should consider a people that already lived daily with a depressed economy and yet a good attitude..where food grows abundantly, yet it's just everything else that is hard to get, and the land is some of the most beautiful in God's creation.

So once my kids are old enough to be in college, I'm looking at getting a small hut in Jamaica.

[threadbear]

I've been extremely suspicious of the comfortable mundane since I was about 13 years old. We haven't just coasted on cheap fuel, trading immediate delights for global environmental problems, we have made Faustian bargains that require lives of dire poverty for fellow humans living in the third world. Every person in North America "owns" the equivalent of 5 slaves abroad; an utterly immoral and unsustainable situation.

Every day this situation continues, to me, is like living in a pleasant (for me) dream, or fantasy realm. That's what is most important for the complacent. Remember that you are living the dream, while in it. Where peak oil jolted you awake, with panic, when you first became aquainted with it, the rotten moral underpinnings should keep you too agitated to fall back into a deep slumber.